Warner Bros, Walt Disney Pictures and 20th Century Fox have announced new release dates for a sixteen films to be released over the next three years. We have information and dates for all of the films, after the jump.

Please Recommend /Film on Facebook

After a fairly short time on the market, Steven Soderbergh‘s film Contagion, to be shot later this year, has been bought by Warner Bros. The studio was bidding against Summit and other studios to nab the film, which already had a big cast attached (Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow) and Participant Media on hand to co-finance the $60m budget. [Deadline Hollywood]

And Warners seems to like being in the Matt Damon business as the studio is also negotiating with he and Ben Affleck to form a new first-look partnership. Damon and Affleck have had one production company together, LivePlanet, which was housed at Disney and was responsible for Project Greenlight. Seeing the two names together instantly conjures up images of Good Will Hunting, which broke them into mainstream fame, but we don’t yet know what they’ll work on, or if this deal will produce a film featuring the duo. [Vulture]

Brief news on Contagion, the recently announcedSteven Soderberg viral thriller penned by Scott Z. Burns. The film already has a hell of a cast: repeating Soderbergh star Matt Damon plus Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard and Jude Law are all in the lineup. Now Gwyneth Paltrow has joined as well, making this a cast that is sizable enough to span continents as a deadly virus spreads around the globe.

Burns and Soderbergh hatched the story while making The Informant!, and the script was inspired by the swine flu outbreak and discussions about “germs and how the nature of a virus could be used to deal with issues of sovereignty and as a metaphor for the way information and misinformation travel in contemporary society.”

The film isn’t sold to a distributor yet, but Soderberg & Co. are shopping it around based on a $60m budget. [DHD]

Steven Soderbergh is putting off his Liberace biopic in favor of something with a little more heat and conventional appeal. Instead of Liberace, this fall Soderbergh will now shoot a script called Contagion by his The Informant! writer Scott Z. Burns. Said to be “an action-thriller about the outbreak of a deadly virus,” the script reportedly is constructed in a style much like that of Traffic. So expect several narrative strands that run parallel, with some of them finally (possibly) intertwining in some measure. Read More »